Today I found out that I lost all of the work I did yesterday morning.¬† Whilst at this time of year that wouldn’t be a huge amount of work, I actually went in early yesterday to write a completely new experiment from scratch.¬† Now before you lot start screaming “why the hell didn’t you backup”.¬† The university I work at provide network storage which is automatically backed up over night.¬† In fact the University constantly state that we should be using this storage for this particular reason.¬† So being a good little code monkey that I am I store all my work on the network.¬† However, during a load of system work that was carried out today, the experiment file I created yesterday disappeared.¬† I phoned up the staff helpdesk and asked about the missing file.¬† The person on the end of the phone didn’t sound surprised that a file had gone missing and immediately arranged for it to be restored from the backups.¬† Approximately half an hour later I received an email stating that they couldn’t find the file in the backups.¬† So I’ve just had to spend the afternoon re-implement the experiment which was lost.
Lesson learnt: Don’t trust someone else or a group of monkeys to backup your data, even if they tell you that they do it automatically.¬† If you can’t live without having the data make sure you back it up yourself.